FlavourCollider visualises your brain's reaction to cocktails

A synaesthetic
drinking installation aims to broaden minds after just one sip of a
cocktail as the experience of taste is translated into individual artworks through the
brain.

Marcos
Lutyens is a multimedia artist interested in the neurological
condition of synesthesia -- which causes subjects to experience
mixed sensory reactions to situations which would normally just
stimulate one sense, for example, being able to smell or hear
colour. He's working alongside Absolut Vodka to bring cocktail
drinkers a visual representation of how their brain is enjoying
their drink as part of 11 to 14 May's FutureEverything festival in
Manchester (tickets for which can be bought here).

It may sound like a bit of a party trick, but there's a lot of
hard science and mathematical theory
behind the FlavourCollider installation. Roy Williams Xmorphia, a
mathematical system which generates forms that mimic the building
blocks of life, formed as the basis for the algorithm that
translates the drinkers' brainwaves into art.

Explaining his role in the work to Wired.co.uk, Lutyens says,
"I'm more like a kind of orchestra conductor. It's very multidisciplinary as we're mixing brain
waves with taste with visuals, and bringing them together is where
my work sits. What I do like about the visuals is that they emerge
mostly out of these algorithms, these equations which allow signals
from our brain to create self-generative art."

Lutyens likes to be "as transparent and uninterruptive as
possible" during the process, in which participants wear a Neurosky
Mindwave headset while drinking a particularly flavoursome
cocktail. Their brain activity is picked up in EEG signals by the
headset which are then translated into real-time visuals on large
flatscreen monitors around the bar. "It's going to be a relatively
quick process", says Lutyens, "but it will allow people to watch
how their subconscious minds react to taste."

The images produced have been created through collaboration
between Lutyen's research and the efforts of the "Xname" coding
team led by Claude Heiland-Allen. Lutyens studied people's
reactions to cocktails created by Absolut supertaster Bex Almqvist.
Participants were asked to discern the shape, texture, form,
movement and colour through their tastebuds. There was a suprising
amount of correlation between the reactions. For example, feelings
of movement when tasting one cocktail included "whirlpool,
underwater, downwards and a rock rolling gently down a slope",
alluding perhaps to the lingering finish of the drink. This
study allowed Lutyens to "build up a kind of relationship between
these parameters and the taste sensations."

An algorithm was designed to sort the headset EEG signals into
either meditation or attention inputs, each with their own distinct
pattern. "The meditation signals are less dense and move slower,
and the attention ones move faster and are more closely packed",
explains Lutyens. The creation of the visual programming was also
informed by the Bouba/Kiki
effect as discovered by German psychologist Wolfgang
Köhler, which demonstrated the brain's association of words and
shapes. "On that basis", says Lutyens, "we associated a sharp
taste, like chilli, with more angular shapes than a smooth
taste."

Colour has remained the one confusing factor in the
visualisation of taste, however. Lutyens says: "It's a difficult
one because although the cocktail comes with a colour, that isn't
necessarily the colour of the taste it may have. Red, for example,
is often associated with strawberry but also with chilli. Colour
become less important to decipher a flavour than form, and the
density of patterns and speed of movement when it came to writing
the code."

Obviously, the images created on the night of the installation
will depend on the participants' brain activity, cocktails, and
perhaps how many of them they've had. However, Lutyen's artistic
impressions of what kind of visuals will be produced can be seen in
our gallery below.